Escondido woman’s life story may become film

The last time readers encountered Maria Magdalena Messer, she was sitting on the balcony of her apartment, relating a harrowing story of survival to her husband, John Messer.

Messer, a retired Navy chief petty officer, would go on to write his wife’s biography and publish it under the title “Indomitable Maria Magdalena” in 2001. The couple live in Escondido, splitting their time between her five children and his six, a blended family that formed when the two married in 1997.

More than a decade after the book was published, Magdalena’s story lives on, and may be headed for the screen.

Messer told me this week that a Los Angeles screenwriter and producer, Rich Araujo, has written a script of the book and is in the process of finding funds to shoot a film — in English and Spanish — based on the story.

“She was abandoned in Mexico City with five kids, and it’s the story of her crossing the border and making it up to the Stockton-Bakersfield area and working in the fields,” Messer told me.

“It’s the story of undocumented people, and it creates a lot of interest, both positive and negative.”

Foremost in Magdalena’s story is family — a single mother shepherding five children through frightening and unfamiliar circumstances. Also present in Messer’s book is an examination, through his wife’s past, of the various forms of employment available to undocumented workers in California, as well as the resulting vulnerabilities.

For a former sailor who became a first-time author after retirement, the prospect of seeing the book come to life in film is “very, very exciting, you can imagine,” said Messer, adding that his primary motivation in writing was “for family, for future generations. Everything comes from that one person who had the nerve and the courage to do what she did to get here.

“The idea of coming from the streets of Mexico City to (potentially) having a movie made about your life is one hell of a long trip, and quite an accomplishment,” he said. “I always say she has the heart of a lion.”

Apparently, Messer is not the only one who sees it that way.

Although Araujo still hasn’t met Magdalena or Messer, he said he read the book last summer after Messer’s daughter, Marte Lash, asked for his feedback as a screenwriter.

From the first page, he was smitten.

“I just loved the tenacity of the character, and the drive of what she had to do to overcome and survive,” Araujo told me. “The first few pages, it was so picturesque. It just came to life. I said, ‘I’ve got a number of contacts — I could write the script, you’ll see if you like it, and if you do, we’ll start shopping it.’”

If successful, he wants to shoot every scene in English, and then again in Spanish: “That way, on the English side, we could go direct to theaters, and with the Spanish version, we could go straight to DVD.”

For his part, Messer has become fluent in Spanish, having first met Magdalena in a language class where her job was to speak to the students only in her native language.